Vendors seeking to improve sales of their products and/or services have recently turned to developing various online marketing strategies with the advent of the Internet. Online marketing strategies may include various methods of increasing online sales including paid for search, banner ads, search engine optimization, etc. One measure of online marketing success is conversion rate, which is a ratio of visitors to a web site who convert web site visits into desired actions based on content from marketers, advertisers, and content creators. The desired actions may be different according to marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers, for example, the desired action may include the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was sparked by clicking on an advertisement. To content creators, however, the desired action may include a membership registration upon visiting a web page.
Vendors may use various strategies to configure their web sites to increase the conversion rate for their products and/or services. One strategy includes altering the configuration of elements on a web page. For example, an element may be an image, a slogan, an ad, text etc. The element may be switched with a different element to determine which configuration of elements on the web page increases the conversion rate.
In order to test various web page configurations to determine how the different web page configurations affect customer behavior, i.e. the conversion rate, a vendor may test two web page configurations against one another. For example, one web page configuration may include ad A and one web page configuration may include ad B. Each web page configuration may be tested on consumers to determine which of the web pages results in a higher conversion rate. However, testing individual alterations to a web page configuration is inefficient.
To avoid this inefficiency, vendors may conduct multivariate testing. Multivariate testing enables a vendor to test multiple alterations to a web page, or multiple variations of the web page, at once, while determining an individual effect of each element on user behavior. Therefore, a conversion rate may be determined for each element of the web page being tested.
To conduct multivariate testing, a plurality of regions of a web page are identified. The vendors may surround each of the plurality of regions with tags that replace content, or the element, in the region. However, identifying and replacing elements in various regions of a web page often involves complex and invasive code being placed inside the web page or being combined with web page generation logic. Moreover, confounding logic with other possibly unrelated web logic may cause negative side effects and decrease maintainability. Also, if changes to two different regions of a web page have any degree of overlap where the changes effect the same element of the web page, the interactions can cause negative side effects and it is difficult to determine an individual effect of each element of a web page on user behavior.